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Free ATS check

Will an ATS reject your CV before anyone reads it?

Most large employers run applications through software before a person sees them. It does not judge your CV; it tries to read it — and a two-column layout, a table or a heading it does not recognise can leave it with half your career. See what it makes of yours.

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Free. No account needed to try it.

Worked example

The same CV, read twice

James’s CV in a two-column template and in a plain one. Below each, what a parser produces. Same words, very different result.

Two-column template

What a parser sees

James Whitfield Operations Coordinator Manchester, UK Skills
Communication Teamwork Problem solving Summary Hard-working and
motivated operations professional Microsoft Office Time management
Experience Pennine Freight Solutions Education BTEC Level 3
Operations Coordinator Apr 2021 – Present Business Leeds City
Responsible for coordinating daily College 2016 – 2018 deliveries

Roles, dates and skills interleaved — the parser cannot tell which is which.

One-column template

What a parser sees

James Whitfield
Operations Coordinator · Manchester, UK
SUMMARY
Hard-working and motivated operations professional with experience in logistics…
EXPERIENCE
Operations Coordinator — Pennine Freight Solutions — Apr 2021 – Present

Every section found, every date attached to its role.

Try it on your CV

Now yours

Upload the CV you send. The review leads with structure: whether the sections, dates and contact details come through, and what is in the way. Your file is kept for seven days, then deleted.

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How it works

  1. Upload

    The CV as you send it — PDF or Word.

  2. See the parse

    Which sections were found, which dates were read, what fell between the columns.

  3. Rebuild

    Open it in a one-column template that every parser reads, with your content already in place.

The guide

What actually breaks a CV in an ATS

An applicant tracking system does not read your CV. It parses it: pulls the text out of the file and tries to sort it into fields — name, contact details, each job with its title and dates, education, skills. Recruiters then search and filter those fields. Everything that follows is about whether the parse works.[1]

Columns and tables

A parser reads text in the order the file stores it, which for a two-column layout is often left column top to bottom, then right column — or worse, line by line across both. Your job title lands next to a skill; your dates attach to the wrong role. The CV looks fine on screen and arrives as noise.[2]

Tables are the same problem with borders. Many CV templates use an invisible table to line up dates on the left and roles on the right; parsers see the cells, not the alignment.

Headings a parser cannot name

Parsers look for section headings they know: Experience, Employment, Work History, Education, Skills. “My Journey”, “Where I’ve Been” and “Toolbox” are headings for a human, and a parser that cannot classify a section may drop it or file it under the previous one.

The fix costs you nothing: use the ordinary words. You can be interesting inside the sections.

Text that isn’t text

Contact details in a header image. A name set as a logo. Skills as icons. Anything the file stores as a picture is invisible to a parser — and a CV with no email address in the text is a CV nobody can reply to.

The same goes for text boxes and shapes in Word: some export as text, some do not, and you will not know which until it fails.

Dates it cannot read

“2019 – present”, “Mar 2019–”, “2019-2021”, “since 2019”. A parser needs to work out how long you did each job, and mixed formats make it guess. Pick one format and use it everywhere. Month and year is enough.

Fonts, PDFs and one more trap

A PDF exported from a design tool sometimes stores each line as a separate object with no reading order, and occasionally stores text as outlines — shapes, not letters. Export from Word, Google Docs or a CV editor instead, and check the result by selecting all the text in the PDF and pasting it somewhere plain. If what you see is your CV in order, a parser will see it too.

What this check does

It reads your CV the way a parser would, then the way a recruiter would. The review leads with structure: which sections it could name, whether every role has readable dates, whether the contact block is text, and what — columns, tables, images — is in the way. Then the wording findings follow, because a CV that parses perfectly and says nothing is still not getting the interview.

When you open the CV in the editor it is already in a one-column template. Change the template as you like; every one here parses.

References

  1. [1]Indeed — How To Write an ATS Resume (With Template and Tips)
  2. [2]Jobscan — Why ATS Tables and Columns Break Your Resume Parsing in 2026

Read next

Questions

  • An applicant tracking system: the software an employer uses to receive applications. Most parse each CV into fields — name, roles, dates, skills — so recruiters can search and filter. A CV the parser cannot read becomes a record with empty fields.

  • Rarely on their own. What they do is make your CV unfindable: a recruiter searching for a skill or filtering by years of experience never sees a record whose fields are empty. That is a rejection with nobody deciding it.

  • Not always — modern parsers handle some layouts — but you cannot know which parser an employer uses. A one-column layout with standard headings reads correctly in all of them, which is why the free templates here are built that way.

  • No. It checks your CV against the things every parser needs: recognisable section headings, dates in a consistent format, contact details in the text rather than an image, and no tables or columns carrying the content.

  • Yes, and so is rebuilding the CV in a free template and exporting it. There is no watermark.

Will an ATS reject your CV before anyone reads it?

The tool is a scroll away, and it is free. Nothing is stored until you decide to keep it.

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